The dangers of mixing medications
Which of these scenarios is risky?
Taking cholesterol medication with grapefruit juice
Taking Acetaminophen for a sore ankle before drinking
Taking aspirin while on a blood-thinning medication
Actually all of them. Drug interactions happen when a substance reacts differently with another substance than it would alone. Food, herbal supplements, legal drugs, and illicit substances can all cause drug interactions.
Most drug interactions fall into two categories. Some take place when two substances’ effects influence each other directly. In other cases, one substance affects how the body processes another.
Blood thinners and aspirin both prevent blood clots from forming. Individually, these effects are usually safe, but taken together, they can prevent blood clotting to a dangerous extent, possibly causing internal bleeding.
The interaction between grapefruit juice and certain medications in a class of cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins has to do with drug metabolism. Grapefruit binds to the same enzyme as statins, making less of that enzyme available to break down statins. So combining the two means that a greater concentration of the drug stays in the bloodstream for a longer period of time, potentially causing kidney failure.
Alcohol can alter the function of the enzyme that breaks down Acetaminophen, potentially causing liver damage even with what’s usually a safe dose of acetaminophen.
The herbal remedy Saint John’s Wort increases the liver’s production of a particular enzyme. That means the drugs this enzyme is responsible for breaking down get metabolized faster, sometimes too fast, before they can have their therapeutic effects.